stay off my tomatoes

[piranha]

in response to the latest ellison incident, there are some people who actually want to do something to improve respect for personal space at SF cons, rather than to just rail about it online.

there is a new community, bellwether_talk for the discussion. if you go to cons, and you are concerned about the issue, please participate. i've always been impressed with the people who populate alt.polyamory and soc.singles.moderated as being willing to discuss issues of personal boundaries, and to do something about them at their gatherings (sticker codes for hug/ask/no, guidelines about photography, etc); i figure those of you on my flist who also go to SF cons might have a lot to contribute to that discussion.

me, i don't go to cons (i've been to two and any groping was consensual, in private -- oh, whom am i kidding, there was no groping, we were too tired), so i am not the best person to talk about what happens there. :) also, i am old now and assertive, and nobody gropes me anymore. but hey, i hear things, so i know it still happens. it certainly happens frequently in greater society. and i remember myself at 18, when at college parties people (usually inebriated) used to grope me repeatedly and didn't react to me inching away and pushing their hands off. i would end up leaving those parties and feel ashamed, like a prude who didn't know how to have any fun. it would have been great to have a code of conduct that the community discussed and published and reminded people of via sticker codes or signs at the door.

this kind of violation is usually clueless, not indicative of the oppression of the patriarchy or worthy of calling the cops and suing somebody for sexual harassment. but it still needs to STOP.

Comments

[nolly.livejournal.com]

In my experience, respect for personal space and boundaries is the norm at cons, and, while there will always be a few clueless wonders who are the exceptions, there's not much that can be done to educate them that isn't being done already -- if they still don't learn, they never will.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

see, that's what i previously thought from accounts i heard, but now that i am following the discussions of this, a number of people come out of the woodwork who say they too were groped and didn't know what to do about it (other than feel like crap), and it clearly left the impression that the community as a whole does condone this behaviour -- and there is pretty much at least one of these in every in-depth discussion thread, which adds up to quite a few people. and from the other side, there are people who say "what's the big deal" who basically make "boys will be boys" noises.

in comparison from what i know of alt.poly, that doesn't sound to me like everything is being done to educate folks, and it specifically doesn't sound like everything is being done to help those who've been groped, and to stand up for them. (besides which i don't subscribe to ideas like "you can't teach an old dog new tricks".)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

From my experience, I've had one person cross a similar boundary in 7 years -- on my first full day at my first con. Everyone who witnessed it was shocked and sympathetic, and in later conversation (once I knew more people) I learned that this was a known offender who was very close to being barred from the con in question -- and had since been kicked out of a Burning Man community. However, he's never done it again, to me, or in my sight, and seems to have actually learned to behave better in public, perhaps from the SO he has now.

Which is to say, yeah, I've got one of those stories, too. And I have enough of the rest of the story to know that it wasn't condoned, and if I'd gone to someone on the concom at the time, he might well have been thrown out on the spot -- I just didn't know who to tell. So maybe that is one place where a little education could improve thing -- I still would've been too new to know, but someone nearby might've suggested it.

I know of a few other cases where the offense happened before my time in fandom; the offenders were told "Do this again, and you are no longer welcome here", and they haven't, to my knowledge, done it again. There's always a grapevine of "Be careful around that one" for the borderline cases.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

this kind of violation is usually clueless, not indicative of the oppression of the patriarchy or worthy of calling the cops and suing somebody for sexual harassment. but it still needs to STOP.

While I agree with you about not calling the cops, and not mentioning the patriarchy when explaining to a given clueless groper what the problem is, I'm not convinced that the cluelessness is, fundamentally, unrelated to patriarchy. It's just very suspicious to me that it's (some) males that are allowed to grow to adulthood while remaining clueless about other people's boundaries.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

the interesting thing is that it's also some women who manage to grow up that way -- i occasionally hear something along those lines from polyfolk, and in the recent discussion there was one woman who complained about another woman groping her and not taking no for an immediate answer either. i have seen groping of men from women among a group of co-workers (blue collar) as well. though the incidence is less, certainly among adults. i can't rightly tell whether it's always the patriarchy that sits behind entitlement attitudes; i can see some class entitlement too that seems separate, and there are other undercurrents. i think some of the problems in the SF subculture might be poor socialization instead; growing up as outsiders and consequently rejecting societal mores (not all of them consciously of course).

with HE in specific i can't tell; it's easy to believe that his sense of entitlement comes from being a man in a man's world. and there are many who shrug this off as "boys will be boys"; that's got patriarchy written all over it. but a lot of his more general abuse seems to come from a form of entitlement that is born from his great intellect. when watching the apologists, that is certainly a main thrust of their arguments too -- he has done so much for us intellectually, surely he can be forgiven for this little slip. he's such a great mind that he can't be bothered by society's mores.

it's always been the case that lots of women have violated people's boundaries. just that the people whose boundaries have been violated have usually been children. but it's not news to me that there is domestic violence and sexual assault between lesbians either, and that gangs of girls behave just as abominably as gangs of boys, and that there are plenty of women who're abusive in heterosexual relationships. but that's not a message that feminism likes, and it therefore gets incredibly little dissimination and attention paid to it.

i am not saying that to excuse the wide-spread oppression of women by men. i just feel (have come to feel) over the decades that there are actually other root causes for violence and disrespect of other people's boundaries, and that it might be worthwhile to attack those.